page_title: Sauropelta
section_title: Discovery and naming
hierarchical_section_title: Sauropelta / Discovery and naming
caption_attribution_description: shielded reptile Visit my blog at ideonexus.com
context_page_description: Sauropelta is a genus of nodosaurid dinosaur that existed in the Early Cretaceous Period of North America. One species has been named although others may have existed. Anatomically, Sauropelta is one of the most well-understood nodosaurids, with fossilized remains recovered in the U.S. states of Wyoming, Montana, and possibly Utah. It is also the earliest known genus of nodosaurid; most of its remains are found in a section of the Cloverly Formation dated to 108.5 million years ago.
  It was a medium-sized nodosaurid, measuring about 5.2 metres long. Sauropelta had a distinctively long tail which made up about half of its body length. Although its body was smaller than a modern black rhinoceros, Sauropelta was about the same mass, weighing in at about 1,500 kilograms. The extra weight was largely due to its extensive covering of bony armor, including the characteristically large spines projecting from its neck.
context_section_description: In the early 1930s, famed dinosaur hunter and paleontologist Barnum Brown collected the holotype specimen of Sauropelta (AMNH 3032, a partial skeleton) from the Cloverly Formation in Big Horn County, Montana. The locality is inside the Crow Indian Reservation. Brown also discovered two other specimens (AMNH 3035 and 3036). The latter is one of the best-preserved nodosaurid skeletons known to science, includes a large amount of in situ armor, and is on display in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. AMNH 3035 preserves the cervical armor and most of a skull, missing only the end of the snout. Expeditions in the 1960s led by the equally renowned John Ostrom of Yale University's Peabody Museum of Natural History recovered additional incomplete specimens from the Cloverly. In 1970, Ostrom coined the genus Sauropelta to include remains discovered by both expeditions. Derived from the Greek σαυρος (sauros) ('lizard') and πελτε (pelte) ('shield'), this name is a reference to its bony armor. Although Ostrom originally named the species S. edwardsi, nomenclaturist George Olshevsky corrected the spelling to S. edwardsorum in 1991 to conform to Latin grammar rules.
   
  Despite the naming of Sauropelta two years earlier, confusion arose in 1972 when the name "Peltosaurus" was inadvertently published as the caption of a photograph of AMNH 3036. Although Brown never published a name or description for the remains which are now known as Sauropelta edwardsorum, "Peltosaurus" was the name he informally used in lectures and museum exhibits. However, the name Peltosaurus was preoccupied by a genus of North American lizard from an extinct branch of the modern family Anguidae (the alligator lizards and the legless glass lizards) and is no longer used to refer to the dinosaur.
  In 1999, Carpenter and colleagues described material of a large nodosaurid from Utah, discovered in a member of the Cedar Mountain Formation called the Poison Strip Sandstone, which is contemporaneous with the Cloverly Formation. He originally referred it to Sauropelta as a possible new species, but it was never named. In more recent publications, Carpenter no longer refers the Poison Strip animal to Sauropelta, only to the family Nodosauridae.
   
  Other recent, but undescribed, discoveries include a complete skull from the Cloverly of Montana and a huge fragmentary skeleton from the Cedar Mountain Formation of Utah. These discoveries have been published only as abstracts for the annual Society of Vertebrate Paleontology conference, and may or may not prove to belong to S. edwardsorum or even Sauropelta when formally published.
caption: Close up of armour, AMNH
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